Alt Tech

You know that scene in the film Contactwhere the “Machine” is spooling up, its three spinning rings kicking out crazy light and an electromagnetic field powerful enough to pitch nearby Navy battleships sideways, as Ellie (Jodie …

When you think about microprocessors and chipsets and circuit boards, if you’re like me, you think in metaphors: tiny green-and-silver cities comprising dozens of chips — some with billions of transistors — on copper …

I took a meteorology class in undergrad as an elective because I’ve always been into the weather: tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos, ball lightning, supercells, squalls, you name it. Not enough to pursue it as a career, but let’s …

Imagine rockets so small you could fit them through a piggybank slot. Imagine those rockets jetting microscopic beams of ions drawn from a reservoir of liquid plasma. Now imagine — or don’t, because they’re not imaginary — that …

Early Monday morning, the 33-year-old version of me watched live as NASA engineers cheered, hugged and patted each other on the back. The Curiosity rover had landed safely on Mars and I was awake at close to 2am on a …

If you follow my column here at Techland, you will know that I write quite a bit about smart devices. The road map of the technology industry is one where very powerful semiconductors and sensors are being embedded into many …

It was a bit surreal to stand in the middle of Times Square and hear a throng of revelers chant “NASA! NASA!” as if the space agency had just won a gold medal in the Olympics. They were cheering the successful landing of …

Dr. Jay Parkinson, 36, gained notoriety in 2007 when he started his own practice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood known for its influx of arty types and bars. Gawker quickly dubbed him the “Hipster Doctor.” He’s also …